SUPERSTORE’s Dina (Lauren Ash) had an incredible arc in 2018, as she went from Glenn’s (Mark McKinney) professional foe to his surrogate.

Naturally, Dina evolved on-screen as she went through the process. But what Ash didn’t expect was the reaction she had while filming “Delivery Day,” the episode where her character gave birth.

“Personally, I have no urge to birth a child or have a human child; I just don’t have it,” she says. “But in that moment, in that room, with the whole thing [going down] and the baby there [after Dina had an unplanned c-section]…when they first brought the baby, I burst into tears. It was very overwhelming; I don’t know why.”

“Dina and I are alike in very few ways, but in that moment, it was a very big thing,” she continues. “The idea of creating life, the idea that there was this thing that was in her, that was going to be out in the world and going to be a human—an adult human one day! It was a very overwhelming moment for me personally, as a an actor, which I never would have thought. And getting to play that moment with the baby—there were a lot of laughs in that scene. But the truth was, the whole time I was fighting tears. And that I thought was very realistic for how she would feel. It’s very her for her to say, ‘I don’t want to hold it, but I feel like I should talk to it.’”

As Dina said her farewell to the child she carried, she bestowed some last-minute wisdom—about half of which was ad-libbed by Ash while filming.

“The bit about the houseboat was me,” she recalls. “That’s such an amazing example of what I love so much about SUPERSTORE—we have these amazing scripts, amazing writers, we have such funny stuff, but there is the ability in the moment to go and talk and explore. And in that moment, I came out with a lot of stuff because I was going through this crazy emotional experience. That was honored and used.”